Menahem Mendel Beilis - Controversy Over Depiction in The Fixer

Controversy Over Depiction in The Fixer

While Bernard Malamud’s novel The Fixer is based on the life of Mendel Beilis, Malamud transformed Beilis’s character, and that of his wife, in ways that Beilis’s descendants found degrading. The actual Mendel Beilis was “a dignified, respectful, well-liked, fairly religious family man with a faithful wife, Esther, and five children.” Malamud’s protagonist Yakov Bok is “an angry, foul-mouthed, cuckolded, friendless, childless blasphemer.”

When The Fixer was first published, Beilis’s son David Beilis wrote to Malamud, complaining both that Malamud had plagiarized from Beilis’s memoir and that Malamud had debased the memories of Beilis and his wife through the characters of Yakov Bok and Bok’s wife Raisl. Malamud wrote back, attempting to reassure David Beilis that The Fixer “makes no attempt to portray Mendel Beilis or his wife. Yakov and Raisl Bok, I am sure you will agree, in no way resemble your parents.”

Nevertheless, The Fixer has caused two kinds of confusion about Mendel Beilis. Some have credited Malamud for inventing aspects of the story that he took from Beilis’s memoir; others have confused Beilis’s character with that of Malamud’s character Yakov Bok. As the historian Albert Lindemann lamented, “By the late twentieth century, memory of the Beilis case came to be inextricably fused (and confused) with… The Fixer.”